Tutorial: How to Make Cinemagraphs with Photoshop

The Internet is abuzz with cinemagraphs, an artistic and more sophisticated form of animated GIFs that fit somewhere between a still image and a moving video.

Cinemagraphs are like animated GIFs as far as the image format is concerned but a big difference is that, in a Cinemagraph, only a portion of a photograph is moving in an infinite loop while everything else is frozen. For instance, in the image embedded above, only the girl’s hair is moving slightly with the wind and the frames repeat after every few seconds.

How to Create Cinemagraphs with Photoshop

Creating animated GIFs is super easy and Cinemagraphs too, as you’ll soon learn, aren’t that complicated to recreate provided you have the right tools.

In this video tutorial, Photoshop guru Russell Preston Brown shares a neat technique that will help you turn a video clip into an animated cinemagraph image using the extended version of Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Russell produced this video tutorial for The Russell Brown Show and was kind enough to allow me to use it here at Digital Inspiration. You can also download a higher resolution version of his video tutorial directly from adobe.com.